Early Years
Powell was born in New Haven, Connecticut, the second child and only son of Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. and Mattie Buster Shaffer, both born poor in Virginia and West Virginia, respectively. His sister Blanche was 10 years older. His parents were of mixed race with African and European ancestry (and, according to his father, American Indian on his mother's side), classified as mulatto in 19th-century censuses. By 1908, Powell Sr. had served as a pastor in Philadelphia and was the lead pastor at a Baptist church in New Haven.
Powell Sr. became a prominent Baptist minister. He worked his way out of poverty and through Wayland Seminary, a historically black college, and postgraduate study at Yale University and Virginia Seminary. In 1908, he was called as the pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City for decades, which he expanded during the years of the Great Migration to a membership of 10,000.
Due to his father's achievements, Powell, Jr. grew up in a wealthy household in New York City. He attended Townsend Harris High School. He studied at City College of New York, then started at Colgate University as a freshman. The four other African-American students at Colgate were all athletes. For a time, Powell briefly passed for white, taking advantage of his appearance to escape racial strictures. The other black students were dismayed to discover what he had done. Encouraged by his father to follow him as a minister, Powell got more serious about his studies at Colgate; he earned his bachelor's degree in 1930. He also earned an M.A. in religious education from Columbia University in 1931. He was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha.
Apparently later trying to bolster his black identity, Powell, Jr. told stories of his paternal grandparents being born to slavery, but his paternal grandmother, Sally Dunning, was born as at least the third generation of free people of color; in the 1860 census, she is listed as a free mulatto, along with her mother, grandmother, and siblings. Sally never identified the father of Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., born 1865, but appeared to have named him after her older brother Adam Dunning, listed on the 1860 census as the head of their household and a farmer. In 1867 Sally Dunning married Anthony Bush, a mulatto freedman. He and his family members used the surname Dunning in 1870.
Before 1880, the family had changed its surname to Powell when they moved to Kanawha County, West Virginia. It was also adopted by his wife, stepson Adam, and their children. His mother's parents, also mixed race, were slaves freed after the Civil War. Powell, Jr's parents married in West Virginia, where they met. Numerous freedmen had migrated there in the late 19th century for work.
Read more about this topic: Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.
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